HOWARD vs GOLIATH
guest newsletter: august, 2003
by Tom Congdon
"Tom Congdon was senior editor at a number of New York book publishing houses, including Doubleday, where he edited JAWS. Later he became editor-in-chief of E.P. Dutton (where he published Campbell Armstrong's classsic thriller JIG).
He is now a writer and free-lance editor living year-round on the island of Nantucket, and he's kindly given me permission to include this essay on my website. I also thank the Nantucket Inquirer & Mirror. "
A week ago Sunday, right here on Nantucket, I witnessed a phenomenon that never ceases to amaze me: a group of people getting ready to vote against their own economic self-interest.
It happens all the time, I realize, all over the place. People in this country who are having a very hard time of it, struggling along from paycheck to paycheck, or who are being laid off to improve their employers’ bottom line, nevertheless give high popularity ratings to a president who represents the very corporate interests that are squeezing them hard.
Why do many of those at the unpleasant end of the worst income disparity in the Western world–the widest gap between the rich and the poor--vote for the party that worsens that disparity with every move it makes–the most brazen example of which being that huge tax break for the rich? Because people are easily misled by clever manipulation of their most decent emotions.
A war is concocted to appeal to their love of country and put the president beyond criticism. When the war, for lack of foresight, goes guerilla and the American death toll climbs, gay marriage becomes the menace of the month. The United Nations and the godless are always serviceable villains, as are women who want to make their own medical decisions. Inevitably the race card will be played again, in due course, though more subtly now than in the days of Bush Sr., when Republicans had only to whisper “Willie Horton” to get gates thrown up around yet another all-white suburb.
Three little words encapsulate the GOP strategy: Talk is cheap. Republicans are brilliant at giving ordinary Americans what costs rich taxpayers nothing–a good wallow in fear and moral indignation--while depriving them of expensive necessities like meaningful health care, first-rate public education, and clean air. How odd that this party talks a very great deal about Jesus Christ, of all people, the working-class trouble-maker who (if you take the Bible at its word) loved the poor, took a sour view of the rich, stressed tolerance and inclusion and love of neighbor, and saved his most withering scorn for moralizers.
The other Sunday, Nantucket got to see the flip side of the phenomenon–a group of affluent people gathered to unseat the political party that wants only to make them richer. The occasion was the visit of Howard Dean to this island. Dean, you may still need to be told, is the ex-governor of Vermont and is competing with a number of others in the 2004 Democratic presidential primaries. That’s a little like saying that David, an obscure Hebrew teenager, is competing for the chance to knock off Goliath. They say it can’t be done, and they’re probably right, but an amazing number of Americans across the land don’t seem to be convinced it can’t. At the time he spoke to that group of 150 mostly very prosperous Nantucketers on that lawn on Hulbert Avenue, a golden mile if ever there was one, Dean was ahead in nearly every poll, was about to appear simultaneously on the covers of Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News, and was raising impressive money from hundreds of thousands of people.
Dean is a vigorous man in his mid-years, with a direct manner, modesty, and humor. He is a physician, a GP, and his approach reminded me of the better family practitioners I‘ve encountered–calm, analytical rather than impulsive, and practical. In Vermont his budget-balancing administration enacted free medical care for every person under eighteen, which seems to me a sensible, tremendously productive thing for a state to do, not to mention a perfect example of authentic, literally honest-to-God applied morality. He doesn’t believe in bribing the very rich to do what they do instinctively: invest their money to make money, creating jobs in the process (albeit as few as possible).
He was against Bush’s go-it-alone, poorly thought-through jump into war, and publicly stated at the time that he didn’t believe the “justifications” Bush was giving us. (In 5 out of 6 cases Dean was right.) But now that we’re over there and Americans are at risk, he persuasively argued, we can be a lot smarter and more realistic about getting the job done.
“As I was listening to him,” the fellow next to me said afterward, “I found myself thinking: ‘Now this is a Democrat I won’t have to talk myself into voting for.’” I myself developed a strong hunch that as president Dean would surround himself with advisors of high quality, which would be a relief after four years of Rumsfelds, Roves, and Rices.
Whatever his appeal to ordinary, shallow-pocketed Americans, who are contributing to Dean’s campaign in large numbers, his appeal to these affluent Nantucketers was powerful indeed. I think the whole crowd would have marched off as a unit, if he’d asked them to, to go ring doorbells in New Hampshire. It didn’t seem to matter that a Dean presidency would cost them. Maybe they figured that solving some of America’s keenest, most threatening social problems would make us all richer.
contents©2006 Campbell Armstrong
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